


iron testaments and dread algebra

by Ziannis (Xenopolitan)



Series: CONVERGENCE [1]
Category: CONVERGENCE - Fandom, Original Work
Genre: Convergence (Zverse), Deep Abiding Sadness, F/F, Implied/Referenced Death in Childbirth, Multi, Problems, Traumatic Childhoods, a mess, abuse mention, cheating (it is resolved), first draft material, gay lesbians, not a real plot, or maybe there is one, please review this is my first original work, potentially indefinite
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-24
Updated: 2016-07-31
Packaged: 2018-07-18 00:00:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 9,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7291423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Xenopolitan/pseuds/Ziannis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dead men and warped women deal with life, disasters, and the threat of each other in a world permanently changed by a multiversal melding.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. wolves are at the door, don't let them in because you know what they came for

_Natalie Irons, atop a damaged skyscraper, directing waves of blue-black force to hold the rubble back from falling onto the crowds below._

 

_Aziza Thule, racing through a war-torn jungle, sabotaging weapons and running refugees to safety, foiling every attempt at bloodshed._

 

_Ziann Niss, eyes aglow under a stormy sky, possible futures and outcomes unfolding below her gaze, nations waiting with bated breath for her decree._

 

_Archas Steele, leaping from stone to stone, dodging bullet after bullet, distracting and infuriating the gunman, approaching like an unstoppable tide._

 

_Team Infinite Fall, in all of their strengths and flaws, changing the world through their dauntlessness and alliance._

 

**Advocate Idraphel, unseen but for his burning footsteps, charred wounds and empty stares in his wake.**

 

**Baron Adacthys Saturday, whose lies have started wars and ended alliances, whose gray mask hides a buzzsaw mind and a knife where you least expect it.**

 

**CL Brenner, with their gun that has ended diplomats, kings, pirates and monsters alike,  and their honeyed-silver tongue that brooks no ignorance.**

 

**Bellona Harrison, with her blackstone claws that draw blood without pause like a blighted dowser, blurring the line between person and beast with every lurching, predatory step.**

 

**The Gentlemen of Last Resort, bleeding nations dry and swallowing hopes like screams in the night, keeping the world exactly the way they like it.**

 

**_\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------_ **

 

Our story has many beginnings, many settings, but the one we'll start with is a monastery in the Himalayan Mountains, hidden from view. Nine circular keeps arranged in symmetrical rings, every snow-caked inch of the grounds perfectly radially symmetrical. Here is the Order of the Perfect Absence, fanatically dedicated to observation and neutrality, striving towards the perfection of absolute objectivity and lack of interference. In the center of this complex, buried in a 10x10 cell in the enormously thick walls, is a fourteen-year old girl.

She is about to have her fifteenth birthday, which will also be the fifteenth anniversary of her imprisonment. She has been an anchorite almost since birth, taken from anonymous parents and sealed away due to her gift. She is a Prophet, born with unequaled divining power.

She is thin, naturally brown skin pale from a lifetime with very little sunlight. Her hair, grey and lank, falls over a fine-boned face made unnaturally gaunt from forced asceticism. She sits, cross-legged, under the single high, barred, narrow window, eyes fixed on the spider above the tiny door, long since her only companion.

The walls are three meters thick, and solid stone, so she doesn't hear the screams, the crackle of flame, the wet, meaty sound of metal into flesh. She does, however, see the quality of the thin mountain sunlight change, become orange and murky. Looking around nervously despite her total isolation, she curls each hand, thumb and forefinger together, into a shape like a '6' or a '9', and brings them together, circles overlapping.

She closes her physical eyes, and opens her metaphysical ones, letting the visions the Sight brings her wash over her. The Sight brings her blood, and fire, tall armored figures descending from a pale metal oblong in the sky and slaughtering the grey-veiled Siblings of Absence like threshers in a field. The monks are weak, thin and intellectual, no match for the cleavers and flame hand-engines of the raiders. She snaps back from the vision, hands over mouth. She resented the Siblings, sure, hungry for a freedom she'd never had, but to see bloodshed and ruin like this? Something she could have never prepared herself for.

 

There's a knocking on the door, rough and metallic. Breathing heavy and ragged, she looks around the circular cell for something, anything to protect herself with. She finds one of the spoons she hordes periodically, bowl worn to a pointed sliver by all the writing on the walls she uses it for. She holds it in both fists, shaking, as the knocking intensifies. The door crumples inward, revealing an enormous, muscular raider wrapped in leather and scarred steel, iron-hafted torch in one hand, barbed, blood-drenched skewer in the other. She screams, and the raider pauses, expecting anything but a thin, shaking girl with a spoon clutched in her hands. It raises its hand, ready to deliver a quick blow to the head, and she's suddenly behind it and in the hallway. Out of the cell for the first time since she entered it, almost fifteen years ago. Behind her, the raider lets out a bubbly choking sound and falls to its knees, and she looks down to see blood on her makeshift knife. She doesn't pause to let this hit bottom, running down the hallway, looking for some way out. The energy of despair and bloodshed hits her like a tidal wave, the poison aura of the besieged monastery eating at her sensitive, cloistered soul like acid. Sobbing openly now, higher brain functions subsumed by the all-encompassing need to survive, she runs, bare feet flying over the stone and snow. The raiders don't notice, wholly engaged in their businesslike execution of the remaining Siblings.

 

She doesn't stop running for a very long time.

 

Nine years pass, seeing the girl move from place to place, never settling in. She discovers how to harness the Sight, and becomes apprentice to a rising succession of wizards, learning far more than they thought they were teaching her before she disappears again. And one day, in the city of Taos, surrounded by low mountain and desert, she sees a yellow flag, backlit by the sun. Entranced, she asks a local what it is, and he tells her.

"Zia," she breathes. It sounds like the sun, like a beginning.

 

Like hope.

  
Zia takes a second name, Annis, from a book of legends about witches she finds in an abandoned house one day. Black Annis, the most powerful and storied witch of all. A good start, Zia thinks. A very good start, indeed.

 

\---------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

A tall glass tube, wires and cables connected to a floating embryo in the center, the beep and hum of machines filling the otherwise silent room.

A baby, too young to walk, see, think, mechanical arms removing, injecting, and shaping, figures in white coats and masks looking on impassionately.

A child, grey-skinned and four-legged, dressed in a white smock, fighting faceless robots unarmed in a stark white chamber, as cameras log her every move and reaction.

A young girl, patches of strange carapace beginning to grow on her skin, solving puzzles at lightning speed, the complexity growing as her fingers begin to blur.

A teenager, now fully bipedal, one eye covered by bandages, facing a suited figure, tears standing but not falling in her eyes, holding her broken arm under his stern gaze.

A young adult, dressed in mourner's garb, injecting a syringe of silver fluid into her arm as a hologram of a dead man looks on.

Archas Steele wakes up with a start, the dream that was really a litany of memories fading as reality comes into focus. Chemosh Steele died four years ago, after two centuries of shady business practices and space crime, and two decades of building an heiress from scratch and conditioning her to be the ideal specimen, and sometimes that feels like it was ages ago, and sometimes like only yesterday.   
There's only so much brawls and carousing can do for a genetically-enhanced memory, and she'd know better than anyone. Archas gets up and begins the daily ritual, polishing limb-chitin, preening wings, untangling hair, and brushing all 108 teeth, before stumbling out of her cabin.   
The Argus-class warp-cruiser  _Anchorite_ has been her home since her 'father's" funeral, four years of exploration, travel, and mercenary work as she tried to outrun Moloch  & Ordinem, the cutthroat law firm hired by a shadow cabinet to acquire the Steele fortune. She's done running. She's made enough money in her travels to hire Caligni, Vashnir, & Barbatos, the best in the business, to stop her rivals from getting what's hers.   
Archas Steele is coming home, and if you wanna get in the way, you'll get paved over too.

 

_\---------------------------------------------------------------------------------_

 

Survivalists are a familiar aspect of life in a world where things go wrong, and in a world where apocalypse-scale events are confirmed and semiregular, the urge to stock up on MREs, wear camo, and stop bathing affects far more people.

Not all of these, however, have the resources of Michaela Thule, who came into the inheritance of a suspected pirate and spent the potentially ill-gotten gains on genetic treatment, the best in tools and weapons, and a reinforced bunker buried in the jungle. Retreating to this stronghold shortly after the conclusion of the Impossible Wars, Michaela found herself pregnant after her last fling in the city before retreat.                                 
Fearing for little Aziza's life after the cataclysm she assumed was imminent, Michaela turned to genetic modification. Treatments for resilience, healing, strength, and other effects were applied to the infant before she was even born, and they were far more potent than the expectant mother had anticipated.                                                                                      
Aziza was only half-human to begin with, but the treatments made her into an  _asheran,_ a powerful and rare race of individuals who were able to breed true after extensive alteration. When she was finally born, the armored carapace that covered Aziza's limbs tore up Michaela's body. She was able only to leave a final message before bleeding out, trusting the systems of the bunker to raise her child.

Aziza Thule grew up hunting and gathering, with only the failing bunker's systems to protect her and guide her. She became a wild child, able to empathize with the animals and to survive, adapt, and thrive. Happy and cheerful, knowing no other way to be, knowing nothing of the outside world, the asheran girl lived a life that, while difficult, made her a strong, competent and pleasant, if somewhat naive person.

This peace, of course, could not last.  
  


\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

The first time you take a life, it's a massive thing. Sickening, terrifying, maybe even darkly thrilling. The second time, it's lessened, but accented with mingled disbelief and exhilaration at your repeat performance. Eventually you become numb to it. Especially when your first kill was at six years of age.

The Glorious People's Republic of Jalmeray used tyranny and the power of a cult to control its subjects, raising armies of conscripts whipped into shape by mad-eyed zealots. Age and caste didn't matter, if you could move and hold a weapon you were pressed into Jalmeray's endless border skirmishes and invasions of neighboring countries. The mad nation, pushed into bloody chaos by the prophet of a dying god, was eventually put down by a coalition of more stable countries, but not without great cost.

Natalie was six years old when she killed for the first time, a weredog trying to take her family's last remnants of fresh water, burying a fork into its neck in panic while it menaced her mother. The Exarch of Sapient Resources, the euphemistic title for the madwoman responsible for conscripts and drafting, declared her entire village a military installment and forced them to the borders to die for the Cause. Only Natalie survived. By the time she was 10, her kill count had doubled, tripled, exponentially increasing. 

At 12, the Coalition of Nations Dedicated to Eliminating Mass Threats, known as the Dogcatchers, invaded, conquered, and dissolved Jalmeray. Natalie, no longer knowing what to do with herself, stayed on the edges, fighting, stealing, and sneaking to survive. A RUSA officer, Miguel Irons, found her trying to make off with some rations, and instead of chasing her off, tried to take care of her. Resistant, hesitant and suspicious at first, Natalie warmed to him, accepting his help, later his affection, and still later even his last name.

At 15 years of age, a terrorist attack made Natalie Irons an orphan again. Heartbroken, furious, she left the RUSA, setting out to the edges of civilization to take up mercenary work. She passed five years working for anyone with money, using her resilience, survivalism, and a minor talent for light magic to work out quite a reputation. Natalie Irons killed 30 men with a broom, Natalie Irons snuck into the Septagon and nobody noticed, Natalie Irons drove a VW Bug across a chasm while evading police pursuit. She took full advantage of this rep, using the admiration of the merc world in place of true happiness.

At 21, she took an assassination job, purpose to take out a pair of conjurers trying to use government resources to summon something nobody knew anything about. She took a team of trusted independent contractors, and went to the edge of the Stone Head Wastes in the Southwestern RUSA to take out the pair. Nobody had told her anything about what the two were trying to summon. Breaking into their tower, disposing of black-shuck guardians like an afterthought, Natalie and her team burst into the conjuring chamber. The ensuing fight took out every member of her team, and Natalie herself was thrown into the rune-circle.

That was when she died.

The Powers in the circle had other ideas.

The soul of Natalie Irons, a human with minor sorcery who had not lived a conflict-less day since her birth, was returned to her body, along with a measure of the Powers that wouldn't let her die. Skin darkened from mahogany to blue-black, eyes turned to silver on night-blue, and sorcery replaced with unbelievable strength and a magic holding the weight of the hungry void, the reborn mercenary destroyed the entire tower in pain-driven panic. She fled into the night, each step carrying her for meters, not to be seen for a while to come.

3 years pass...

Natalie Irons, a fist-fighting gravity-manipulating mystery-woman, moving with the gravitas returning from death provides you, trying to move on and make a new life for herself, haunted by horrific dreams and visions, outrunning the memory of death every day she's alive.


	2. you don't know what it's like to get your head lumped in

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> we've introduced our main ladies, now the story proper gets going

 

New Xenopolis has been compared to many cities, real and fictional, over the years. Gotham, Alexandria, Ankh-Morpork, Paris, Sigil, Prague, the list goes on. What Natalie Irons would compare it to, however, is a beautiful goddamn mess.

She stands inside the Bon Selene, an upscale restaurant in the Steele Building, the jewel of the downtown skyline. She likes a little luxury, but these places always make her feel uncomfortable, like her speech pattern and dress are a sham, and someone will see the war orphan inside and force her out. She takes a deep breath, and makes herself relax. Zia needs me, she tells herself. I just need to keep an eye on the Brazen Ambassador, and everything will be okay. I belong here. I am calm, cool, collected and competent. Eyes opening, she begins to sidle over to the table where the rowdy, boisterous dinner party of the Brazen Ambassador is seated. Her contact, a redvesper named Third Hatched Under Harvest, sees her and waves her over with both left hands.  
"Zzelina Halzzora! How nizze to zzee you! Come, zzit down, we've juzzt began getting to it!"  
The insectile devil enthuses, using her alias as agreed beforehand. Natalie smiles a glitzy diplomat's smile and takes a seat next to Three, concealing her trepidation with a lifetime's experience at hiding fear. This is the last time I play bait, she thinks.

Archas Steele, mane of dreadlock-like tentacles crammed into a black watch cap, shifts on the rooftop opposite the Bon Selene.  
Stupid to be crouching outside my own damn building, she thinks, polishing away another invisible spot on her rifle, but if you want a devil sniped right, you snipe her yourself.  
She checks the rifle for the seventh time in the last ten minutes, making sure the modded old slugthrower will respond when she needs it to. She generally uses energy weapons for accuracy, but that would be too easy to trace back to her in the night. She doesn't think about the questionable morals of sniping someone off a roof, because sometimes you have to grit your teeth and do things the sneaky way. Besides, the Ambassador's a devil, she probably had it coming. Probably eats, like, human baby kidneys or some horrible shit like that. A voice comes in through her earbud, jolting her from contemplations of diabolic diet.  
"Archas! Are you in position?"  
She responds, barely elevating her voice above inaudibility, letting the mic pick up her throat's vibrations.  
"Calm your  _shabv,_ girl. I'm looking right at the Am-brass-ador this moment, gun locked and loaded." The voice continues.  
"Good. Remember, the passwall shell first, and don't worry about Nat, she has shielding." Archas makes a noise of affirmation and leans in, sight clicking into place. Time to shoot her a deviless.

Zia Annis hunches over a dish of ink in the back of a van dubiously labelled "Icarus Aviation: Since Tuesday Last Week". Magic eyes, conjured with glass marbles and the blood of a sphinx she knows, watch Archas on the roof, Natalie in the restaurant, and the streets surrounding both buildings, as well as the van itself. She may not be able to stop anybody from in the van, but she definitely won't go unwarned. She confirms Archas's position, and sends in an eyeball to scope out the Ambassador. She's a deceptive thing, a slim, bronze-skinned woman with a pair of tiny black horns and eyes like tiny suns suspended in red wine, but Zia knows her true colors, has seen beyond the "mortal-devil cooperation" rhetoric to the bodies in the basement, the backdoor deals with abominations like the Qlippoth. She's a threat to the city and its people, and Infinite Fall won't have that. She lets one of her magic eyes burst in a flash of ultramarine light, a shade Nat can see but devils can't, letting her know it's about to start. Soon one of the hundreds of threats IF know about will be no longer a concern. 

Aziza Thule, barely breathing hard, dodges another blow from the hulking capramace bodyguard. Capramaches make decent meat shields, but they can't resist a challenge, so Aziza challenged him to a brawl on the loading dock, assuring him a friend was keeping an eye on his charge, the Brass Ambassador herself. Which wasn't wrong, exactly, it's just that said eye was a sniper's scope. She allows herself a smile at the thought, then leaps upward, spinning to crack the capramace across his goatlike jaw with her tail. He grunts, and lumbers forward, raising a hoofed foot to strike. She takes it against her shin carapace, grunting with the impact, and responds with a sharp jab to the abdomen. Their audience, a concubus and two redvespers uncomfortable in a dinner-party atmosphere, applaud, the concubus yelling for her to " _shvlk_ his  _ikrikah,_ " which can't be comfortable even if she knew how to do that. Laughing with the sheer exhilaration of fighting, she jukes around the capramace's side to catch him in a headlock, lashing his burly torso with her tail. In the corner of her eye, she watches the timer on her watch run down. Almost showtime...

The moment of truth hits. Archas fires a shell enchanted to open a resealable hole in the window, followed by a sanctified osmium slug radiating bitter cold. It punches straight through the Ambassador's sternum, throwing her out of her chair and onto the ground. The assembled fiends shriek and roar in confusion, and Natalie rolls onto the ground, taking Three with her and cloaking them in an egg of spacial distortion. Zia activates a powerful illusion, dampening the private room so that nobody will hear anything amiss, and nobody can teleport in or out. Aziza snaps the capramace's neck, whispering an apology, and hurls a vial of amnesiac gas at the onlookers, vaulting through a window in a single motion. Archas releases a fusillade of shots, hitting each fiend at the table with a minimum of three slugs in vital areas. Natalie begins folding space with alacrity, slingshotting her and her cargo to the exit. Zia drops a blanket application of an illegal transmutation to change apparent cause of death in a recent corpse. And Aziza slides down a wall, slinks around an alley, and joins Zia in the van. Archas calls in a moment later, relief in her voice, saying she'll be down in a minute. Natalie drops Three off at the lobby and steps in through the doors. The shells disintegrate, the magic eyes self-destruct, and the capramace's body begins to steam. One more threat taken out. One more job pulled. Just another New Xenopolis night....


	3. we're packing heat cause it's cold out here

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the handsome assholes

 

Cut Men were supposed to be some of the best killers on the streets. Biomodified, highly trained, heavily armed, the difference between a Cut Man-marked person and a corpse was supposed to be a matter of time alone.

Supposed to be.

Infinite Fall had disposed of the six that CL had sent, like they were thugs in an old superhero cartoon, instead of the best assassins red-gold could buy. It had been brutal but fascinating to watch, as well as massively infuriating. 

CL Brenner pounded their desk in frustration. They could earn the money back in hours, but that wasn't the important thing. The important thing is that they had been defied, again, by the same aggravating passel of waifs and strays. They reach for an old-fashioned speaking tube in the shape of a sandwyrm's multi-jawed mouth. "Harrison! Get down here, and bring your grievous bodily harm pants. I have a job for you."  
A muffled voice comes up through the floor.  
"WHAT"  
CL sighs and picks up the tube again.  
"Use the damn tube, Bellona! I did not spend three hundred astrels on this speaking-tube aesthetic so you could yell through the floor like a docksman in a taverna!"  
There's a clattering thump, as if somebody who doesn't quite grasp stairs is navigating a flight, and then CL's door swings open, hard enough to bounce back and have to be pushed open again. A tall, scarred woman in a battered red parka steps through, clawed, stony feet scuffing up the immaculate hardwood flooring.  
"CL. What is happening."  
Her voice is loud and monotonous, the voice of someone who didn't grow up around people. CL smiles, folding delicate brown left hand over gold-and-gunmetal mechanical right hand.  
"Bellona! My favorite bloodthirsty abomination against God's good order! I need you, to commit some violence, in downtown NXC, to our mutual side-thorns?"  
"I am the only bloodthirsty abomination against God's good order who lives in close proximity to you. And yes. I will commit violence to Infinite Fall. Who I assume you mean. By sidethorns." CL smiles, brushing an invisible speck of dust off their immaculate off-white lapel.  
"Yes, dear. Go commit some crimes, will you?"

 

 

Archas ran her tongue over her nested, inhuman teeth, brow furrowed in concentration. This was the most difficult challenge of her career, the most intricate, the most--

Zia cut in, trying not to laugh.  
"Archas, you know we can get a larger Jenga set--"  
"SHJSHJHSHH! I'm  _focusing._ " Archas hisses, not averting her gaze from the teetering tower of nested blocks. They sat in the Alizarin Rook, a board-game library/cafe and a popular place to meet and unwind. A fierce and tense Jenga match had been going on for the last half an hour, Archas and Zia locked in competition leavened with friendly jabs and anecdotes. But now, with the tower teetering on a single supporting block, jokes had petered out, replaced by a ferociously concentrated silence. Archas's massive hand, gripping a tiny wooden block battered by years of use, rose with the speed of an antique dumbwaiter towards the top of the tower. Everything depended on this one move.

_**KOOM** _

An impact from outside shakes the Rook, and the tower of blocks collapses.  
" _Son of a FU-"  
_ Zia cuts Archas off in mid-cuss.  
"C'mon, architect of ruin. We should probably deal with that?" Grumbling about lousy acts of nature interrupting certain victory, Archas rises from her reinforced chair and follows Zia outside, where an antique corroded diving bell is steaming in a crater in the middle of the street. The hatch rattles and shakes, as if somebody's trying to wrench it open from the inside, and finally just flies off the bell and lands on the street with the  _roinroinroin_ of the one intact hubcap in a car-crash. The rocky, red-veined fist that dislodged the hatch rises from the bell, pulling along an angular, red parka-clad figure with sharp metallic ram's-horns parting a mess of lank black hair. Archas snarls, recognizing her.  
" _Bellona Harrison._ Don't think I've forgotten what you did to 'Ziz. I'm gonna crack you like a slab of toffee, you rabid ulcer in the stomach of a cancerous goat!" Harrison laughs like somebody who has only seen laughter and is carefully imitating it.  
"Come here, Steele. I will carve a map of your failures on the flesh of your back with my own claws."  
Archas snarls, cracking her carapaced knuckles, and Harrison responds in kind, flexing her black, stony claws. Zia casts a quick suite of protection spells on Archas and fires a flare into the sky. No sense facing this alone.

Natalie, towing Aziza behind her, rockets towards 12th Street in an envelope of shaped gravity. The flare is not to be ignored. The text, maybe, the arm slug, certainly, the flare? Never. She touches down, carefully descending to the asphalt like a butterfly alighting on a grass blade. Aziza hops off, flexing claws and barbed tail in anticipation.  
"I am  _not_ letting that  _khorishtel_ piece of garbage do me like last time." Natalie lays a reassuring hand on her elbow.  
"Don't worry, peranh. We'll take her apart. She caught you by surprise, last time." Aziza nods. "Let's get her, Nat." They advance towards the cloud of steam in the center of the street.

Archas and Bellona trade furious blows, snarling like tussling animals. The polished kerambits in Archas's hands throw off sparks as they deflect Bellona's vicious claws, and her tail and wings beat at her foe's smaller body. Harrison's broken-glass smile stretches past human limits, glowing red left eye reflecting Archas's desperate face. She bites Archas in the forearm, piercing the beetley armor and drawing silver-tinged blood. Archas roars, slamming her foe on the ground back and forth like a martial metronome. Harrison screams, backflipping out of Archas's grip and landing on her feet. She pulls a massive barbed greatsword, crackling like hardening lava.  
"I wonder how your flesh will taste."  
Archas whips out a bastard sword with a kheferu blade, more like a cleaver than a sword.  
"Come here and find out, when you  ** _eat my ass!_** " The swords clang off each other like colliding battleships, and the street shakes.

Zia rapidly throws barriers of magic around the combatants, trying to prevent the fight from hurting bystanders. A blinking red light flashes in the corner of her vision. "Shit, she brought a bomb! NAT! Get the bomb, it's inside the bell!"  
Natalie nods and turns to Aziza.  
"Go blindside that rabid meat-grinder. I have a bomb to find." Aziza nods, smiling. "You can do it, Nat!" Natalie returns her smile and launches herself towards the bell. Aziza vaults over the barrier, landing soundly on Bellona's back.  
"MISS ME, GORELEECH?!"  
Bellona screams and throws herself backwards, trying to dislodge the furious asheran. Archas takes the extra room to draw a massive chymical pistol from inside her jacket, and aims it squarely at Bellona's face.  
"Get clear, 'Ziz! I'm gonna liquefy this knife depository." Aziza pulls Bellona into a headlock, drawing tarry red-black blood with her fingertips. She stares Archas's weapon in the barrel, eyes widening.  
"Shelyn-0! SHELYN-0!" A nimbus of amber light surrounds her.  
"This is not over, Infinite Fall." She vanishes, leaving behind a heat-shimmer in the air. Behind her, Natalie yells out. "Get clear! I can't defuse it!"

**_SHKOOM_ **


	4. nothing compares to a quiet evening

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ABRUPT MOOD SHIIIIIIIIIFT *bass drops*

 

Archas rises slowly, letting Aziza and Zia free from under her shielding bulk.  
"Nat? Nat! Nat, are you okay?"  
The smoke clears, revealing a four-pointed scorch mark, a pile of scorched bell shards, and Natalie, a bead of sweat rolling down her cheek as she dampens the explosion. A bulb of peligin force crushes out the bomb, leaving nothing of the street harmed.  
"Ladies, I have handily squelched a bomb, with my bare hands. You may deliver accolades and gift baskets to the abandoned steamer next to the saltwater taffy emporium." Aziza sweeps her up in a massive hug.  
"Nat! I'm so glad you're safe!" Natalie kisses her on the nose.  
"Never fear, love. Natalie Irons cannot be quelled so easily." A truly saccharine display of public affection ensues, until Archas coughs.  
"Nat! I'm glad you're safe, Aziza, I'm glad you're glad. Please, find a room. There are children and lonely women in sight of your incredibly gay display."  
Aziza puts Natalie down, looking both sheepish and incredibly pleased with herself. Zia opens a portal in the air. "Let's go home, ladies."

Laduguer's Failure, a bohemian district famed for its blending of magic, luxury, fashion and cutting-edge cuisine, is also home to the townhouse Zia Annis lives in, and her friends frequently crash at. Named for an ancient god of labor that the Failure is famed to be an abomination to, called the 'Guer by its most self-unaware inhabitants, it is where the trendiest and most ambitious live, work and play. Currently, Infinite Fall are walking down its art-lined streets, taking the scenic route. "So, Archas? Rematch at the Rook tomorrow?"  
Zia asks, grinning broadly. Archas laughs, slapping her on the back and almost sending her head over heels.  
"You're on,  _ipequen."_ Zia punches her in the arm, almost breaking a finger.  
"For the last time, I'm  _5'8''!_ That is the  _human average!_ It's not my fault you're a god damned giantess! Not everybody can be nine feet tall, you amazon." Archas cackles, lifting Zia onto her shoulders.  
"C'mon, hobbit. Let's get home." Nat stifles a grin, and Aziza gigglesnorts.  
"And you said  _we_ should get a room." 

Aziza opens the door with her foot, carrying Nat in bridal style, and Archas follows her, swinging Zia low to avoid the lintel.  
"You had the ceilings raised! I can still see the furrow marks from my horns from last time, though." Zia grins, scratching Archas behind her ear affectionately.  
"Those grooves are practically part of the family at this point. I'd miss em too much." The four make their way through the opening hall of the spacious house, past indoor waterfalls of sand, glass sculptures of gods, plants with eyes, and clocks that measure danger, distance and sexual tension, leaving a trail of discarded clothing in their wake. The destination, a sumptuous bedroom with a circular 14-foot bed on a dais. The mood? Ecstatic, eager, ravenous. The intended activities? Best left behind a fade to black.

The sun is setting by the time they wake up, rising one by one as cosmogone rays of light filter through the elegantly shaded window. Archas rises, nude and flushed with absolute satisfaction, looking out over the 'Guer ablaze in evening light. From behind her, Zia says "Gay." Archas turns, smiling fondly.  
" _I'm_ gay, huh? Says the girl who, not three hours ago, put her--" Zia floats up to silence her with a kiss. " _Ar_ chas!" she giggles, sounding mock-scandalized. Archas laughs heartily, hugging the smaller woman. A few feet away, in the bed, Aziza rolls out and stretches, yawning. Natalie rolls over, mumbling. Aziza touches her gently on the shoulder.  
"Wakey, wakey, eggs and bakey!" Natalie grumbles into the mattress,  
"'m vegetarian." Unflagged, Aziza continues, "Wakey wakey vegetables!" Finally, Natalie tumbles out and onto the floor.  
"I live here now. I am Floor Nat. Queen of the pernambuco floor planks. And whatever this is under the bed. How many boxes of toys do you  _have,_ Zia?" Zia treats Natalie's prone form to an insouciant grin.  
"Exactly as many as I need to elicit that question, darling. Let's get going, shall we? The night is newborn, and there are occult bookshops to trawl, dark corners to poke, and bleak moors to stare dramatically over." Natalie climbs to her feet with a hand up from Aziza, and Archas turns from the window. "Let's get to it!"

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> whoops i have committed a sin


	5. wendigos in the bowling alley

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> is anybody even reading this lmao  
> i give the ladies a nice outing before shit takes place

 

 The 'Guer shines like an earthbound constellation in the sunset glow, apostasite bedrock sparkling, the seaside fair filling the air with cheer and noise, those with night business emerging from clubs, dens and hideaways. In this twilit carnival atmosphere walks Zia Annis and her girlfriends, taking in the sights and noises with familiar pleasure and confidence. Archas stops at a stall, trading the top-hatted Kalestri behind the stand a rostygold bangle for a dish of mixed tempura.  
"Thanks, Shaal. You put in those subtyrian snailets i like?" The Kalestri smiles, revealing a grin entirely bereft of non-gold teeth.  
"You know it, Big Steele. Smooch your little wizard GF for me, will ya?" Archas laughs, nodding, passing Shaal a fist-bump, and returning to the others. They share out the tempura, giggling and fighting over the choicest pieces as they walk, looking around at the Saturday evening splendor. For that one moment, everything's perfect.

It doesn't last.

A scream rings out over the revelry, a human sound that fades into a cold, rattling howl. Zia curses, a fruity Infernal oath that tints the air sepia for a second, and Archas hurriedly swallows the last piece of fried snailet like a snake with an egg. Aziza turns unerringly to the source, tripartite ears turning and flicking.  
"C'mon, we have to help!" The others nod, and as one they begin running for the disturbance. Archas gathers everyone up in her arms and carries them above the crowd, quartet of angelic wings beating. From this vantage-point the source of the scream is clear, a starburst marring of ice and gouge-marks scarring the boardwalk sloping down to the Thalassic. In its center, next to what looks like the remains of a food-stall, crouches a massive wendigo. Bestial skeleton showing through transparent cyan flesh, ragged clothing-remnants strung across its bulky frame, it looks around with clear confusion and apprehension. Zia swallows, a drop of cold sweat forming on her brow.  
"Wendigo..." Archas looks down at her with concern.  
"Zie? You okay? What is this thing?" Natalie cuts in, voice level and serious.  
"When a sapient being has thrice eaten the flesh of its own kind, it becomes a wendigo, a beast of cold, madness and hunger. Judging by the location of the transformation, the food-stall was serving sentient flesh. We can deal with that after we have contained the threat."  
Without another word, she conjures a long inky-blue whip and approaches the monster. It looks at her with hollow eye-sockets, a cloud of frigid vapor hissing from between its hooked teeth. Clawed hands easily two feet across open, curl into ripping form, and swing through the foggy air at Natalie, who steps backward almost casually, avoiding the attack. She calls out to the others without turning.  
"Help me lure it away to another area. We cannot fight it among the crowd."

Zia rifles through her grimoire frantically, looking for an appropriate spell. Behind her, Archas taunts the wendigo, luring it along the avenue towards an unoccupied building.  
"Come get some, amateur! I've thrown up more people than you'll ever eat!" Aziza harries the creature, the stick pushing it towards Archas's carrot. Natalie, warping distance with economic hand motions, pushes people away from the fight, clearing a space to fight without casualty. They reach the building, the loping wendigo leaving a trail of hoarfrost in its wake. Archas kicks open the door and Natalie shoves the creature in, sending it bowling head over heels into the dim space, an old bowling alley, empty and partially stripped due to new management. The wendigo moans, a sound of abject pain and loss, and Aziza winces.  
"So lost...We have to help her! She didn't ask for this!" Natalie nods, biting her lip. "Zia! Find the most potent cursebreaker you have. We will not kill what could possibly be redeemed. Archas, you and Aziza keep it cornered. Don't let it bite you, whatever you do!" Archas and Aziza share a look, then nod. As one, they close in on the wendigo, Archas whipping an ornate, esoteric-looking spear from thin air, Aziza uncurling her tail from about her waist. 

The bowling alley is surprisingly undamaged by the time Zia's found her spell. Archas twirls and flicks the spear, blocking the wendigo's attacks, and Aziza keeps it from escaping by using her tail like a barrier. Natalie hovers around Zia, trying not to appear anxious.  
"Guys, I have the spell!"  
Zia pulls a bar of violet light, shot through with crimson streaks, from her book, and begins chanting.  **"Let the storms of My might quench the flame of your curse. Become Reformed, reclaim your sanity, accept your third chance. So say I, so it must be."** The dusty air of the alley begins to smell of black tea and woodsmoke, and red light shines from the eyes of both Zia and the wendigo. The wendigo diminishes, translucent cyan flesh becoming deep red, simian skeleton dwindling to a bestial humanoid frame. Finally, the wendigo, now half its former size, crumples to the ground. Now recognizable as vaguely feminine, her formerly animalistic grunts resolve into rather more human sobs. Leaning in, Zia makes out, amid the tears,  
"I'm so sorry, so sorry, so sorry, please." Zia kneels next to her.  
"Tell me everything."

Natalie and Zia, controlled fury in their eyes, march into the NXPD Precinct One office. Natalie slaps down a list, densely packed with names and locations the shivering wendigo gave them, onto the front desk.  
"Under your noses, somebody has been plotting the creation of monsters out of innocent civilians. Either you help us, or we solve this alone. Either way, this stops,  _now._ "

 


	6. you know i can make your body levitate if you let me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> my weaknesses, domestic fluff and fight scenes

It's raining in New Xenopolis.

Thunder crackles over the city, drowning out the sound of the desert city's bedrock expanding gently under the unfamiliar deluge. The heavy rainfall cools the sunbaked city,  and citizens everywhere leave their buildings to look up in wonder, basking in the delightful storm. It's a peaceful, quiet time, everyone taking time off from their daily business to appreciate the unusual weather.

It's the perfect time for the heartless to take the people of the city for all they're worth. 

Advocate Idraphel sharpens a pair of brass knives, with folded, beaten blades and spiral-carved stygian ivory handles, scraping them against each other in a horrible harsh rhythm. He looks from the window of his shitty motel room out over the peaceful city, contemplating his bloody purpose as he hones his tools. Studying them in the grey halflight, he turns and swings a knife through a lamp, shearing it in two. Satisfied, he nods and tucks them into crossed sheaths under the small of his back. He turns to the mirror and brushes imaginary dust off his immaculate black priest's garb, rubs at a spot of dried blood on his inhuman brass mask, and adjusts his collar. Time to preach to the masses, a sermon of the truth in pain, the enlightenment in suffering. He leaves the motel room, rubbing metal hands together in anticipation.

A dry breeze, heavy with the scent of salt and sun-baked stone from the Carock Flats, wafts between buildings and down streets, a contrast to the fresh, damp air the rain provides. Zia Annis, out on her usual morning walk, a paper sack emblazoned with  **HERE COMES BAGEL BAG** swinging from one hand, a disk of red force above her keeping the rain off, stops to sniff the air, and to think. The salt brings memories, memories of sea and stone and sights deep beneath the earth. She sighs, and continues down Phedre Road, heading to Natalie's brownstone, where the others are waiting. Behind her, from rooftops and behind chimneys, Idraphel stalks, a brace of chain and pointed weights swinging from one six-fingered hand, dripping blood and oil onto the roof-tiles.

Zia curses and drops her bag as Idraphel drops from the roof, cratering the street and rising in an overdramatic fashion, swinging his chain in a figure-eight.  
"Dude what the hecke, you made me drop the bagel bag!" She looks up, and actually sees who she's talking to.   
"Oh _fuck_ , it's _you_. What in the good goddamn are you doing here, you creepy grave-robbing tinplate?" Idraphel chuckles, letting out a burst of sulfur from behind his mask.   
"What am I ever out and about for, little prophet? I'm here to kill you." Zia whips a silver rapier with a tentacle-designed basket hilt from thin air.   
"Better than you have tried and failed, eggbreath. Let's make this quick, I'm bringing breakfast and if Archas's lox gets smashed up it won't be pretty." Idraphel inclines his head, and lunges forward.

Zia's rapier is prehensile and extensible, the product of months of research and alchemy, but even with the enhanced defensibility of such a versatile weapon, it's all she can do to deflect Idraphel's chain. He swings it about in one hand, using palm-strikes from the other to direct the weights in scorpion-like rapid attacks, putting Zia on the defensive. She jumps backward, getting out of reach, and begins fishing through the capacious pockets of her jacket, pulling out a jade ring and a copper ball and slamming them together. A wave of electricity bursts from the trinket, washing over Idraphel and singing his somber garb. He throws his head back, seeming almost to revel under the attack, and drops the chain, whipping his long, serrated knives from their sheaths behind his back. Zia lets out a sigh.   
"Why do I always deal with the freaks? Masochism is not for the battlefield, my dude." Replacing the copper trinket with a slim crystalline rod in a stage magician-like flourish, she aims it and speaks a word in a language like a giant clock with peanut butter and glass between the gears striking twelve, sending bolts of ice like shooting stars rushing towards the brass priest. He snarls, trying to dodge the cold bolts, the ones he fails to avoid bursting on him like fireworks and caking his frame in diamond-bright ice.   
"Whatever you do to me, prophet, it won't stop what I've already done today. I have sent three already to Chugarra's embrace since this rain began falling, and that won't change even if you do not join them!" Zia lunges forward, sword in hand again.   
"You do NOT get to KILL people for your STUPID FUCKING RELIGION, you MISTAKE!" Screaming, she slashes with renewed fury, flensing his suit from his lanky metal-sheathed frame, drawing up sparks with every impassioned blow. He swats her sword away, backflipping out of reach.   
"Blood will tell, Zia Annis. I will return." He vanishes in a plume of smoky flame, leaving behind a spell-scorched stretch of pavement, a panting Zia, and a miraculously unscathed bagel bag.

Zia slams open the door of 1261 Phedre Road, muttering curses in Infernali that tint the air sepia. Natalie turns from where she's making coffee, and Archas and Aziza look up from Archas's tablet.   
"What's up, leggy? Long line at the Bread Forge?" Archas asks, standing and crossing the tastefully minimalist room to get Zia's bag.   
"No, that _absolute f_ _ucker_ Idraphel showed up! He's as sloppy as ever, so I was able to save the three he went after before me, but he got away again, and now I've burned three Breaths of Life and a Bite of Cocytus before I've even had my bagel." Archas lays a comforting hand on the smaller woman's back.   
"You did the best you could. We'll get him anyway, and you stopped those poor people from meeting his creepy gods. Sit down, eat your challah. You did fine." Breathing out, Zia nods, and Archas shepherds her to the kitchen table. Aziza reaches into  **BAGEL BAG** and divvies up the contents, sliding bagels to everyone, and Natalie sits down with four mismatched mugs of coffee. Zia begins to relax in the company of a warm challah, a mug of black sugar-loaded coffee, and the three people who mean the most to her in the world. The sound of rain on the windows, Archas and Aziza chattering about current events, and Natalie's warm, patient smile melt away the tension. Life is never easy, but it's always worth it, every day. She needs help remembering that, sometimes.

 


	7. casually we're breathing with the pharoahs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> did u forget abt the wendigo  
> i almost did lmao

Redmond's Gall stands at the very edge of New Xenopolis, far from the city, nestled in the shadow of a tall mesa studded with massive, unnatural cacti. A shell of dark red resin, eerily organic, sheltering a three-towered prison complex. Here is where dangerous inmates are kept, but also anomalies, hexperimentation victims, and those who cannot walk in society but are innocent of wrongdoing. 

A white-hulled shuttle flies in against a dust-laden wind, alighting on a crooked gantry next to a pair of circular bay doors. These open, revealing a skinny human in a lab coat and dark red body armor, face obscured by eight-lensed goggles, flanked by a rangy Kalestri missing her lower right arm, and a beefy Mordakkan, wearing identical garb sans goggles. From the shuttle steps Natalie, followed by a duffel bag-toting Zia. The goggle-wearer greets her with a wide grin.   
"Hello, Ms Irons! To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?" Natalie shakes his hand, pulling an ID card from her pocket.  
"Dr. Scaldwell, a pleasure as always. We're here to see Penny Vashir, in D wing?"  
Scaldwell looks confused for a minute, before the Mordakkan elbows him and whispers in his ear.   
"Ah yes, the wendigo! Nasty business, that. We're all indebted to you, I'm sure. Right this way, Navine will show you the way." The Kalestri raises a hand in greeting. "Over here, ladies, just down this hall and to the left." She opens one of the Gall's circular iris-doors, revealing a roughly hexagonal room bisected by a transparent glassteel barrier. On the side nearest the door is a table and two chairs, on the other side is a matching table and chair, a bed, and a bookshelf. The wendigo is sitting at the table, 'hair' pulled into a rough ponytail, dressed in a dark grey Gall coverall.  
"Thank you for coming to see me, Lady Irons. And thank you, Lady Annis, for freeing me."  
Zia sits down, leaving the duffel bag on the floor, and Natalie joins her.   
"Yeah, we wanted to talk about that, Ms Vashir. Why did you transform down at the 'Guer? What happened to you?"  
Penny looks away and down, somehow managing to convey shame with bare eyesockets and jawbone. "I...I grew up in Jalmeray." Natalie winces and nods, reaching to her upper arm as if it pains her. "That explains the first time, at least. So did I, so did we all. What about the second time?" Penny begins gnawing at her knuckles, other hand gently gouging furrows in the table that heal after a moment. "I ate my own foot, because I had been trapped in a mudslide after the Purple Leviathan hit Newfoundland."   
Zia speaks up, "Jesus, lady, your life has been a litany of horrible happenings. You grew up in Hell Lite, and then a living goddamn hurricane attacks and you have to eat your own foot? And then, this?" Natalie nods, pulling out a pad of paper and a pencil.  
"Yes, what happened at Laduguer's Failure?" Penny shudders. "Human flesh at the burger stand. That has to have been it. I went up to the person, ordered a cheeseburger, and when I bit into it, I recognized that...that taste..." She begins sobbing, and Zia moves to comfort her before remembering the window in the way.  After a moment, she pulls herself together. Natalie asks gently, "Do you remember what they looked like? The stand owner?" Penny nods, wiping a smoking jade tear from a transparent red cheek.   
"They were slim, brown, with an eyepatch and a tricorn hat. Weirdly pretty, and wore gloves." Natalie and Zia look at each other. Natalie nods, and Zia grits her teeth. They speak simultaneously.  
 _"C.L."_  

They speak with Penny a little longer, and promise to visit in a couple of days. Navine escorts them out of the Gall, to the shuttle-bay. On the shuttle home, they share a silent conversation, spoken in looks.  
 _The Gentlemen here in town?  
_ _Has to be. CL here, means Bellona at the very least.  
_ _Which explains the other day, outside the Rook.  
And Idraphel, yesterday.  
_ _Exactly._  


Yesterday's rain on the heated plains of the nearby Carock Flats gives rise to fog, rolling in over the city in quiet, pale banks. Natalie stands on the balcony, drinking in the fog-diluted sunrise, performing her morning stretches. Below, the comforting rumble of Aziza's snoring mixes with the distorted trumpet and tuba of Archas's leithan band music, and the rustle of Zia rolling around in her sleep. Home sounds, morning sounds. Peaceful, familiar. Natalie lets out a deep, satisfied sigh, stretching out into an elaborate yoga pose.  
There's a reverberating  _THUD_ from downstairs. Without opening her eyes or turning, Natalie sighs again, this time less satisfied.  
"Archas, dear, what is it?"  
The clatter of shell on hardwood rises from below, and Archas bursts through the door, clad only in tank-top and shorts, incongruously holding a battered Salamander sidearm.   
"Nat the _re is a Gentleman at the door what do we do"_  
  
Natalie throws on a jacket lying over the railing and jumps off the edge, drifting down to the ground like a leaf. She rounds the corner to the front of the house, and sees the grey-jacketed, blank-masked figure of Adacthys Saturday, standing patiently at the door, looking for all the world like a door-to-door salesman. Natalie raises a clenched fist, night-blue energy coalescing around it.   
"Saturday! Why have you come here, to my home?"  
He turns to her, tipping his immaculate top hat.   
"I'm here to deliver a warning, Natalie Irons. As you have no doubt figured out, the Gentlemen of Last Resort are here, to attend to some...difficult business. The unaware does not provide good sport, so I am letting you know."  
Natalie assumes a defensive, incredulous posture, void-cloaked fists at the end of crossed arms.   
"Oh yes, you're just full of goodness and fairness. What's the angle, Adacthys?"  
He's already turning, making a complex gesture with one hand, a silver disk of mist appearing in thin air. "Something big is going down, void-child. Be ready." He steps through and vanishes, the circle fading into fog wisps that blend into the pre-existing mist. Natalie dismisses the force from her fists, planting them on her hips. Archas, from her position watching on the roof, calls down, "Well that wasn't ominous at all!"   
Natalie replies without looking up.  
"Wake up Aziza and Zia, please. We must discuss this."


	8. i said hey, girl with one eye

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> i'll cut your little heart out/cause you made me cry

Aziza and Zia, hands wrapped around mugs of coffee, sit blearily at the kitchen table, Zia still wrapped in a massive quilt. Natalie sits across from them, posture impeccable as always, and Archas paces in the kitchen relentlessly, chewing on a cinnamon stick.   
"The Gentlemen of Last Resort are, as we expected, in town with something in mind. Saturday appeared at our door with a warning not fifteen minutes ago, which means that something of significant import is in the near future. We must alert the local Cuprilach Foundation chapter, and stockpile resources."  
Natalie speaks in a calm, precise voice, not belying the apprehension in her voice. Zia downs half her coffee before replying.  
"This ain't good, guys. Last time they gathered in one town for something, they woke up the Grey Leviathan and almost sunk Kyushu. I'll go to the Stranger's Archive and look up if there's anything like that they can exploit in New Xenopolis." Natalie nods. Behind her, Archas ceases pacing.   
"Good idea, Zie. I'll go trolling for evidence, see where they're holed up and maybe what they're up to. Aziza, you're with me."  
Aziza punches the air in triumph. "Yes!"  
Natalie nods. "I will alert my contact at the Foundation, let them know of the threat."  
Zia looks down at herself. "First, I'm go get dressed. Underwear and a shirt that says-" she pulls out the oversized shirt she's wearing to read it better- "'Steeles do it harder and hotter' is not acceptable couture for a library crawl."

The Stranger's Archive looms over the Lomas and Third Street Library, a burnished-nickel and travertine-marble colossus rising from the glass-and-adobe complex of the library proper. Zia steps through the bronze doors engraved with the story of the Convergence in a dozen languages, into the cavernous entry hall, hung with statues, machines and trophies. Taking a left into the New Xenopolis History wing, she begins sifting through the scrolls, books and etched tusks, looking for something that the Gentlemen could exploit. She pages for hours through records, headlines, black-boxes and myths.  
SEVENTEEN LOST IN ELEMENTAL BREACH INCIDENT  
CHUPACABRA CONFIRMED, EXSANGUINATES TWELVE IN CORRAL SHOOTOUT  
CACTUS PEOPLE DISCOVERED IN ARIZONA, SMARTER THAN HUMANS  
MAN EATING CHICKEN EXPOSED AS HOAX, ACTUALLY CARNIVOROUS BIRD  
Groaning, she sits back, running fingers through her hair. What a absolute waste of time. Maybe the others are having more luck.

The Copperhead Building, like a massive kettle crouched on a brownstone slab, gleams in the desert sunlight. Inside this metallic behemoth is the local HQ of the Cuprilach Foundation, keepers of law and sanity, hunters of monsters, finders of dread artifacts. Sometimes overzealous, sometimes vengeful, but always strong and competent, Natalie knows the Copperheads will be able to at least defend against whatever threat the Gentlemen can dig up.  
She enters the side door, along the porphyry-floored hallway, straight towards the buried office of her contact, Deputy Chief Inquisitive Malu Jones. Jones looks up from his needlessly ostentatious three-monitor display, hiding a game screen with such practiced efficiency that if Natalie hadn't known him, she would have missed it entirely.   
"Hello, Ms Irons. What is it this time?"  
"I would like to inform the Foundation of a Kyton-class threat, possibly even Rakshasa. The known terror group, the Gentlemen of Last Resort, came to my home the other day and told me of an imminent plot. I would be remiss if the proper authorities were unaware of this impending threat beforehand."  
Jones blinks, once again struck by Natalie's blunt efficiency. "You can, of course, substantiate these claims?"  
"I sent an email five minutes ago, Sgt Jones. If that's all, I have other business to attend to?" Jones nods, opening his mail client.  
"The Foundation thanks you again, Ms Irons."

 Aziza and Archas stroll down Phedre Road, chatting idly. They reach a comfortable silence as they turn the corner, just walking and looking around, arm in arm. Archas pauses and turns to Aziza.   
"Did I ever tell you about the time I was on Shegani, and fought this crazy pirate woman?"  
Aziza looks pensive for a moment.  
"No, but I think I heard a little snatch of it when you and Zia were talking a couple weeks ago. Tell me it?"  
Archas nods decisively, cracking her neck to the side.   
"Aight. Settle in, Ziz. It's _storytime._ "

Archas weaves Aziza a long and rambling tale of the junk planet Shegani, and how she saved it from pirates with a core-sundering bomb. Talking animatedly as they walk, she stops abruptly at the conclusion, when it comes time to reveal the fate of the pirate captain. Aziza lays a comforting hand on her shoulder, and they proceed onwards.  
  
Behind them, atop a high sloping roof, Idraphel and Saturday stand, watching.  
Waiting.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yeah ok im putting side stories in another doc
> 
> glossary:  
> ipeqen/ipequen: asherani, shorty, small, little  
> khorishtel: asherani, unnatural, abomination  
> goreleech: asherani, slang for sadist, lurker around battlefields, cannibal  
> peranh: jalmerish, feminine of per  
> per: jalmerish, comrade, friend, literally "family member not related by blood"  
> perakh: jalmerish, masculine of per


End file.
